Why Maxim Dounin Forked Nginx to Launch Freenginx

Maxim Dounin, a long‑time core developer of the Nginx web server, announced on February 14 that he is forking the project to create a new branch called Freenginx.

Dounin explained that his decision stems from a disagreement with F5, which acquired Nginx in 2019, and from recent interference by non‑technical management in the server’s security policies.

“F5 closed its Moscow office in 2022, and I stopped working for them. Although we reached an agreement for me to continue as a volunteer, the new management wants to control the open‑source project and ignore the developers’ stance.” “This violates our agreement, and I can no longer control the changes made inside F5. Therefore I will no longer participate in the F5‑managed Nginx development and will launch a developer‑run project instead.”

The goal of Freenginx is to keep Nginx development free from arbitrary corporate actions and to invite community contributions.

For reference, the original announcement can be found at https://freenginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2024-February/000000.html .

About Nginx

Nginx is an HTTP and reverse‑proxy server, a mail proxy, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy originally written by Igor Sysoev.

It powers many large Russian sites such as Yandex, Mail.Ru, VK and Rambler, and as of January 2024 it served or proxied 20.71 % of the busiest websites according to Netcraft.

Just as the community once debated Oracle‑JDK vs OpenJDK or MySQL vs MariaDB, developers are now encouraged to follow the progress of Freenginx.